Proxima: 15 March 2004 - 1 February 2007

I was employed at Proxima Technologies eventually as the  IT Services Manager from 2004 till when it was sold to Compuware Corporation in January 2007. This entails management of IT systems, and Services provided to 3 countries around the world and to over 100 employee's. The management of these systems are performed by a small team of admins and programmers. It involved a lot of hours and a lot of interaction with other offices however it was a job that I enjoyed and one that most days gets me out of bed. I do like to face a challenge, especially one with a great group of people.

Before the manager position, i was a Systems Administrator. This job evolved into more of a Systems Architect roll looking after the requirements, and deployment of new systems. This roll was quite a good one as it exposed me to several new technologies and it allowed me to experiment with a lot of Open Source technology as well as comercial products.

Proxima created a product called Centauri which is a Business Service Manager. This product was deployed in some rather impressive places which are detailed on the company homepage.

I was responsible for 4 countries Infrastructure including LAN, Wan, and Phone systems, on a daily basis i dealt with Sparc, HP-Risc, PPC, Intel/Amd hardware, and various Operating systems (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, Windows etc). I also ran the company databases (Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL), as well as a wide variety of different network monitoring and other applications (HP Open-view, BMC patrol, CA unicenter to name a few).

The first two years were spent stabilizing the existing network and then hardening, and automating as much administration as possible. FAI and CFenging are a wonderful combination (in a testing environment so far anyway).

I joined Proxima in March 2004 after finally deciding that enough was enough with iinet.

All in all the people i worked with were great, and the job was pretty sweet also. I got a really good exposure to different technologies, and got to play with some nice hardware.

IInet/Chime: September 2003 - 15 March 2004

Well what can i say about a company which i loath from the bottom of my heart.

Iinet originally purchased Ihug in September 2003, and from the moment they started things went down hill. The whole thing was called a "Merger" but the only thing that merged was the customer base into the iinet system (well it's supposedly done).

After the initial merger, we were asked for idea's on things, and then our idea's were taken and thrown away. After which they enforced shitty policies on our network which didn't work, and then proceeded to implement hardware onto a stable network which caused several total network crashes (from switches which had run flawlessly for 12 months before hand), thanks to network cables being plugged in the wrong way. This was just one example of the incompetence that was iinet. Well most of it.

Don't get me wrong. Some of the guy's do actually know what they are doing and they are probably the only reason that they (iinet) are still around these days.

At iinet i learnt a lot about poor management style, a little about network gear (i was mainly Lucent Trained while @ Ihug, and chime is a Cisco shop), and also got to travel around outback Victoria.. What a joy that was...

Anyway enough bitching about that/... I have more but I've hidden that file away under fear of defamation suit's :P

Ihug: 15 November 1999 - 15 March 2004

I started to work at Ihug in November 1999 as a Level 2 Help desk Tech. On my first night as a green tech i was dumped into the queue of people pissed that they couldn't connect to the net and was basically taught the fun way of doing help desk calls :).

After landing on my feet and making friends with the help desk mob, i managed to move around rather quickly and freely at Ihug. Having just over 8 positions in the 4 1/3 years that i was there. A brief time line is below.

• 1999 - Level 2 Help desk Tech

• 2000 - Level 3 Help desk Tech and acting supervisor.

• 2000 - Business Help desk/Startup of Ultra Wholesale Support.

• 2001 - Assistant to the Ultra Department manager while she was not available.

• 2001 - Ultra Department Manager.

• 2001 - Full time Ultra Wholesale Support due to Growing Customer base.

• 2001 - Junior roll in Engineering to give the department help when needed.

• 2001 - Assistant to Bandwidth Manager (while also doing wholesale support and engineering tasks)

• 2002 - ADSL Roll Out Team.

• 2002 - Full Time Engineering (Sad to see Morgan go though).

• 2003 - Senior Network Engineer specialising in Server Administration and minoring in networking for Ihug.

• 2003 September - RIP Ihug, New position with Chime Communications.

• 2004 - Network Administrator for Chime communications as well as Senior Engineer responsible for the Australian Ihug Network.

Well that's some of it.

I learnt about 90% of what i know while at Ihug. All my networking, the satellite stuff, the server stuff, best practices, large scale network design, the joy's of Debian in a practice environment, the hassles of users, the joy's of 2am wake up calls, the fact that Nokia phones will quite happily take a beating and still come back for more (including being pelted against a bring wall), to name a few.

The best thing about Ihug though always had to be the people who worked there. I've made many a good friend there (most of whom i still keep in contact with on a daily basis), and hopefully I've helped some of these people as much as they have helped me over time.

The Engineering Team at Ihug was one of the best I've ever seen, with everyone knowing there roll very well and working as one big machine with the ability to side-step the need for bureaucracy, or working together to get around it.

The network in the end was first class thanks to the efforts of Simon Lyall, Leon Chang, and others. Long gone were the days of 6 hour outages thanks to the satellite being out, or Global One having issues :).

Also we had one of the best operations teams around who when they called you at 3am in the morning, you knew it was because it was a proper fault and not because they didn't want to deal with something.

All in all i have to say that so far Ihug's been the best company that I've worked for in a long time. I will admit that it wasn't always fun nd games and that I've had my share of trying times but in retrospect it was a great company.

And i think all who have worked there will agree with me.

Abuzz: March 2000 - September 2000

Johns and Associates: November 1998 - November 1999

The rest (so far)

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